Link2US

First International Workshop on Social Object Networks

Oct 9, 2011

Boston, US

The First International Workshop on Social Object Networks will be held from 9 to 11 October 2011 in Boston, US.

The web has become a space where users engage in many daily activities, such as shopping, reading news and books, listening to music, watching videos or sharing views on current topics and objects. The availability of such activities in digital form has been fuelling social network-related research and development.

'Social objects' are the focal point of many social networks. In fact, anything that allows people to connect, whether directly or indirectly, can be regarded as a social object, and can produce a social network graph. Examples of social objects include pictures on a photo-sharing website, tags on a media aggregator, places on a location-based website, posts on message service and goods in an on-line marketplace.

Much current work, however, seem to flatten such multi-dimensional networks, where the social objects are often left out of the networks and analysis, and replaced with direct edges between the people in question. For example, people who watched the same film on a website are represented as two directly connected nodes in a graph.

With social networking sites becoming increasingly more open, such as through exportable profiles and third party applications, it is now possible to generate very rich cross-community social networks that capture social connections in many different forms and around many different social objects.

BILAT-USA (Grant Agreement no: 244434) and Link2US (Grant Agreement no: 244371) Projects are co-funded by the European Union’s Capacities Programme on International Cooperation under the 7th Framework Programme for Research and Technological Cooperation.